Violin Concerto, Opus 66

Thomas de Hartmann (Foma Aleksandrovich Gartman) was born on October 3, 1884, in Khoruzhivka, Ukraine, Russian Empire, and died in New York City on March 28, 1956. The Violin Concerto, Opus 66, was composed in Courbevoie, France, in 1943. Soloist Georges Alès and the Concerts Lamoureux gave the premiere on March 16, 1947, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, conducted by Eugène Bigot. The Concerto is dedicated to de Hartmann’s friend, the French violinist Albert Bloch. First BSO performances: November 20-22, 2025, with Joshua Bell as soloist and Jonathon Heyward conducting.

In addition to the soloist, the score for the Violin Concerto calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, oboe, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, piano, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

A brief entry in the venerable Soviet Musical Encyclopedia describes these as the distinctive qualities of Thomas de Hartmann’s music: “colorful harmonic techniques, vivid instrumentation (with virtuosic deployment of percussion), and a skillful use of polytonality and polyrhythms.” What these comments do not convey is the profound emotional impact of many of his works, including the Violin Concerto. His lifelong experience of displacement and his relentless pursuit of higher spiritual meaning in a world of senseless violence infuses his stylistically varied music with a compelling urgency and mystical depth.

As a student at St. Petersburg Conservatory in the early years of the 20th century, de Hartmann drank deeply at the well of Russian romanticism and nationalism. He retained a love of Russian folklore and folk music throughout his career, as a kind of connection to a more tranquil era. Modest Mussorgsky’s music exerted an especially strong influence. (Viktor Hartmann, de Hartmann’s uncle, had created the illustrations that inspired Mussorgsky’s cycle Pictures at an Exhibition.) The lyricism of Arensky, Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky remained an important element in his style, as one can hear in the passionately poetic passages of the Violin Concerto. 

Unlike Stravinsky and Prokofiev, de Hartmann did not become involved with the circle of composers who gravitated towards Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the Parisian scene before World War I. Instead he moved to Berlin, where he created complex multimedia works under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky and the avant-garde dancer Alexander Sacharoff, few of which were staged. His experiments with the concept of synesthesia, finding correspondences between visual and musical phenomena, resembled what Alexander Scriabin was also doing at the same time in such works as Prometheus, Poem of Fire (1910).

After he became a follower of mystic Georgi Gurdjieff in 1916 until their split in 1929, de Hartmann turned toward music of the Middle East and Orient with which Gurdjieff was very familiar from his extensive travels in the region. In the 1920s, he and Gurdjieff collaborated to produce around 300 short compositions for piano primarily intended as accompaniment for meditation and physical exercises for spiritual development. Gurdjieff would whistle or play the melodies with one finger on the piano, and de Hartmann would transcribe them into European notation. Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett later recorded some of these pieces in an album entitled Sacred Hymns.

Most of de Hartmann’s orchestral music dates from the 1930s and 40s, including the three concertos that are the best-known of his symphonic works. These and his other major compositions could perhaps best be described as polystylistic, combining the many different influences he had encountered in his eventful life, including jazz, modernism, and folk music of different traditions. In 1938, the Boston Symphony gave the premiere of the Cello Concerto, completed in 1936, under Serge Koussevitzky with soloist Paul Tortelier. The Piano Concerto followed in 1939 and the Violin Concerto in 1943.

In the score, de Hartmann wrote this descriptive note: “To better understand the character of this concerto, one must imagine the ghost of a Ukrainian folk musician, wandering at night through the war-torn steppes of his country and playing sad or macabre melodies. The motifs in the concerto are not taken from folk music. All are original, except, in the middle of the first part, the folk theme Kamarinskaya, already used by Mikhail Glinka in his famous fantasy.”

De Hartmann wrote the concerto in 1943 while living in an abandoned house in the town of Courbevoie, France, the Nazi occupation of that country having forced the de Hartmanns from their own home. Musicologist Evan A. MacCarthy has written that the concerto “mourns the destruction of Ukraine by war.” Even though de Hartmann had not lived in Ukraine since long before the Bolshevik Revolution, he retained fond memories of his youth there. The concerto juxtaposes rapturous lyrical passages with savage episodes that express the composer’s profound sense of loss and outrage.

In his lifetime, de Hartmann had witnessed more than his share of militarism and violence, but the horrors of World War II—including the Jewish holocaust in Ukraine and elsewhere—profoundly affected him. Although he was not Jewish, de Hartmann had from his early years felt a strong connection to Jewish spirituality. He even described the Concerto as the “klezmer concerto,” and secretly dedicated it to his friend, the Jewish violinist Albert Bloch, who had fled Paris and settled in Grasse, near Cannes. Bloch had played several other works of de Hartmann in the preceding years, but sadly did not survive to perform the concerto.

There is no obvious quotation of Jewish or klezmer material in the concerto, as there is in numerous works of Dmitri Shostakovich of the same period. But in the macabre dance of death in the third movement minuet, and in the wild 2/4 dances of the finale, one hears clear echoes of Jewish folk music. 

In four movements, the concerto opens with a four-measure orchestral introduction, a series of modulating chords that establishes a solemn and almost religious mood. “I was immediately struck from the very first note,” Joshua Bell has said of this haunting opening. “I thought, ‘What the heck is this?’ It was so beautiful, and unlike anything else.” The violinist then enters with a keening lament, a cry of anguish and grief. 

Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska, who recorded the concerto in 2024 with Bell and the INSO Lviv Symphony of Ukraine, said in a recent interview that she sees the violin as de Hartmann’s “alter-ego, coming back to a war-torn Ukraine and trying to search for lyricism and beauty in the country of his childhood that is now completely shattered.”

After the soulful introduction, the first movement proceeds in a lighter mood, with plenty of virtuoso passages for the violin. Darkness intrudes at regular intervals, with military outbursts from the percussion, but the orchestral accompaniment is for the most part restrained, and the movement ends quietly, with the violinist playing over a gently rocking figure in the orchestra, rising in harmonics to a serene A minor cadence.

The second movement Andante weaves a series of variations on a yearning melody, a serenade for the soloist that winds down to a cascading cadenza and a reassuring F major close. What comes next, the Menuet fantasque, scored for strings and the soloist, is a unique and original surprise, a tiny neoclassical interlude in sprightly dotted rhythms that seems to recall happier times in the distant past. But a note of the grotesque creeps in, especially in the droning middle section, with a quirky folksy flavor. We feel the presence of “the ghost of a Ukrainian folk musician, wandering at night through the war-torn steppes of his country and playing sad or macabre melodies.”

Another folk-inflected tune opens the rather short finale, an exhibitionistic tour de force in rondo form, with the orchestra playing a more aggressive role. A devilish dance in 2/4 meter climbs to a whirling climax that provides a dramatic catharsis, releasing the emotional tension that has accumulated in the preceding 40 minutes. Here, de Hartmann unleashes the full percussion battery (timpani, piano, drums, xylophone, harp, tambourine) and the brass section, leading to an energetic, if not exactly victorious, conclusion.

After its premiere in Paris in 1947 by soloist Georges Alès, the Violin Concerto was forgotten for many years. A later performance by Alès with the l’Orchestre Nationale de France was broadcast on the radio, however, and became known in musical circles. When Joshua Bell was introduced to the concerto a few years ago by an admirer of de Hartmann’s music, Efrem Marder, he “absolutely fell in love with it.”

“As I started exploring the concerto, I was immediately struck by the depth of emotion it conveys,” Bell said in an interview. “I was astonished that such a powerful work could have escaped me and most classical music listeners until now. This concerto is both heart-wrenching and uplifting, and as gripping and relevant today as it was when it was composed in 1943.”

Harlow Robinson

Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.